I had never heard of Spilt Milk Studio before I got the review code to Tango Fiesta. That might be because this is their second game on Steam (both within a month and ever). Their first, The Legend of Tango, claims on its Steam page to be “a short comedy JRPG that tells the story of how Tango Fiesta was born.” That game is free and has mixed reviews. I then went to find out more about the dev. Their website is a Tumblr page. So I didn’t have high hopes for this game. But never judge a book by its cover and all that I loaded up to see what was what.

 

So, Tango Fiesta is a twin stick shooter. That sums up the game. Run around with one stick and aim with the other and shoot. A concept that has been around since I care to remember and longer than that. So as you can imagine the control system is pretty basic. Run, shoot grenade, knife, sprint, action button, change weapon and reload. Pretty simple mechanics. The worst thing about the mechanics is the aiming. With most twin sticks it is possible to aim in many many different directions. This meant that it was easier to get kills and destroy things. In Tango Fiesta there is just 8. Up, down, left, right and the buttons in-between. This makes aiming extremely difficult. The amount of times I have been killed because I couldn’t aim at the enemy fast enough. I shouldn’t have to move to aim at something unless it is in cover. Even the Call of Duty twin stick got it right.

 

The main aim of each level is to complete several objective (normally destroying things) and then survive while killing the rest of the enemies in the level. This is all done while collecting money and scoring points. The money is used for buying different guns (which I will talk about in a minute). The level design is extremely simple. Each level is an island with water that slows the player down. The problem with that level design is that they have used each of the tile types 4 times. 4 on a tropical island, 4 in what is meant to be Europe I think. It feels like they got too happy with CRTL – C and CRTL – V hotkeys. They are pretty don’t get me wrong but I can only look at the same images a couple of times before getting really annoyed that it isn’t different. They could have been so creative and they just didn’t.

 

The plot of the game can be explained by saying the simple phrase “EVERY 80’S ACTION MOVIE EVER”. Basically, the main character is called John Strong and he is explaining what he did when he was an actor. The player then goes through different levels as mentioned before completing objectives. The plot while extremely tropesy (in my head that is a word) is quite well done and the writing is really quite funny. It is one of the best parts of the game in my opinion.

 

The other best bit is the sheer variety of weapons and characters that are playable. To begin with there is about 7 characters and 3 guns. All these have a set of stats that changes between characters. As far as I can tell there is no way to upgrade these which is annoying as I would like to choose a character I like playing and making them better and better. What there is however, is a way to unlock new guns. The way they have done this is to unlock the ability to buy them with in game currency. It seems to me that they are trying to make more work. As much as they want people to keep playing I feel that it would turn people off when they have finally unlocked the best weapon in the game and then they have to pay $2 million to use it. It is infuriating.

 

I am not going to lie, I didn’t expect much from this game. I feel bad about that because what I got I was surprised about. It does have its flaws and there are things that I think could have been done better, the weapon unlock system for one, but all in all it is quite a small, tidy game. It is a little bit pricey for what it is however. It comes in at £9.99 UK, $14.99 US. At this price point I would expect a little more so I would recommend picking it up in the sale.